Tuesday poem: Palm cockatoos
July 16, 2012
Palm cockatoos
Heads like a child’s drawing of bird heads,
huge beaks and feather manes, flopping,
last extant beat-poets, croaking of things
hep and cool. Man, you hit bedrock
on that arching drum, selecting the sticks
that give the deepest echo, sound playing
through tall wooden amplifier,
from dark roots to hazy blow of sky.
You contemplate the waving tops
of tropical trees, plumed angel-head,
stylish in your black daytime rhythm.
Inimitable pulsing punctuation,
beaky accent perched above
the forest’s bright green flow.
(The palm cockatoo is the only wild animal known to select, and possibly to store, sticks for use as musical instruments.)
P.S. Cottier
I am fascinated by palm cockatoos, although I have never even seen one. They live in the far tropical north of Queensland. The tattoo comes from much closer Queanbeyan, just over the border in New South Wales.
So why would you get a tattoo of a bird you have never seen? A little reminder that there are more things in heaven and earth…an encouragement to discover new worlds and boldly go…a cheap and less seedy way of being a pirate?
I don’t know, but I think the tattoo artist did a good job. (Thank you Carbine.) I have posted a black and white photo as the colour one I have makes my skin look a rather alarming yellow: just below nuclear buttercup. I will try and obtain a better photo, as the detail is blurred in this one. But this is my cockatattoo forever looking for sticks. My skin is the drum. Watch your finger!
For poetry, much of which is written in a country where tattoos are not unknown, please press this feather:
Tuesday poem: Whales at the coast
June 12, 2012
Whales at the coast
It’s not the acne of barnacles pock-marking flippers;
a bump-headed sculpture garden on triangular flesh,
that phrenology of brainless mounds, indecipherable,
alien’s braille, hinting at a saga of years and fathoms.
It’s not the blimp size, surfers becoming rubber em dashes
as the Miltonic whale justifies them down, wipes them out.
It was the blast that we heard on the shore, as she lay
on her back, performing a solitary circus for her calf,
each heavy grey sail brought down, as if a tent were falling.
The boom arrived two seconds later. I timed it, trying to bring
her epic capers within a scale I knew, of measured ticks
around my watch. She who has Australia’s rock-mouthed coast
as a west-turned comma, against which her life sometimes bobs,
and over which she sends deep explosive barbs of noise
to pierce our bracketed lives. From below, the bass rumble,
as the Right whale cavorts, ecstatic, off shore near Eden.
PS Cottier
Eden is an old whaling town on the far south coast of NSW. It has always struck me as amusing that such a horrible industry was carried out in a town with the name of Eden. I have never actually been there, but moved my whale sighting poem further south down the coast of NSW so as to capture the historical and biblical associations of the name.
At least whales can travel our coast now without being slaughtered. Head a little further south again though, and the troubles begin.
This poem appeared in my first poetry collection, The Glass Violin.
I am probably one of the last poets to post a Tuesday poem today. It’s the afternoon in New Zealand, by now. Yesterday was a public holiday for the Queen’s birthday in the ACT (how many does she have, I wonder) and I keep forgetting that it’s in fact Tuesday. Or that’s my excuse, anyway. Click this feather to see all the other Tuesday poems, including a memorable one from Keith Westwater about the details of crime. I’ve already commented on that one, which shows just how pathetic my excuse for being late actually is…Must learn how to lie. Or to relax.
Tuesday poem: Magic from the inside
May 14, 2012
Magic from the inside
I am stuck in the conjured darkness,
mere pipe-cleaner, fluffy punch-line.
A thousand sharp screams penetrate;
giggles like flick knives reach inside.
The kids are having a great time.
I wait. Wish for real transformation,
of this black to a field of satin green,
soft as the emerald handkerchief
he converts to clover with an extra ear.
But breathing is a trick in itself, I find,
here in the crushing long tube of night
before sudden birth into searing light.
Then staccato taps of two dozen hands
on a hopping, fat balloon who squeaks.
He pushes me into the cage and says
I tried guinea pigs but they bit.
Hats off, I say, to the pigs with teeth.
P.S. Cottier
This poem was highly commended in the Gold Coast Writers’ Association Adults’ Poetry Competition, 2009, judged by Graham Nunn. (I like to send my poetry to sunny places, where it gets a tan and fake platinum blonde hair and a fluorescent bikini, before coming back to Canberra.) The topic was magic, and I thought of the unfortunate animals that perform at children’s birthday parties.
Now for other poems, most of which are probably not wearing swimmers, even of a practical cut, but rather beanies and ug boots and woollen socks, click this feather:
Tuesday poem: Mouth brooding
April 30, 2012
Mouth brooding
In damp mulch, he swallows young like knowledge.
In a quiet vocal sac (now choked from croak)
they flow into commas, hoping to punctuate
the forest’s leafy library of tales. He spits!
Out pops a haiku of wiggle,
a soft finger of amphibian,
pooling into an anthology of puddle.
Seven froglet booklets, sprightly as thoughts,
swim towards their future. Must this language,
this webbed poem, be forever lost?
P.S. Cottier
Hop in! There's no recycling either.
The mouth brooding frog, of Chile and Argentina, also known as Darwin’s frog, is related to the gastric brooding frogs (I am not making this up) that used to live in Australia but which are now presumed extinct. The female gastric brooder would swallow her young; the male mouth brooder does the same sort of thing, but in a slightly less thorough way. I believe there were two types of gastric brooding frog, both now gone, as recently as the 1980s. I have to check this, but I believe that the cane-toad which continues to munch its way through a lot of our wild-life, may originally have come from Chile, via Hawaii. (Our fault, not Chile’s!) So there’s another terrific amphibian link with that country.
Here’s a link to an Australian site with information about frogs and frog conservation. And an American one. You’ll have to google it yourself for elsewhere.
For more poetry, hopefully less depressing, hop over (sorry, it’s addictive) to the Tuesday poem site, by clicking this feather:
Tuesday poem: Cockatoos and a global birthday poem
April 17, 2012
Cockatoos
Yes, we’ve heard their sad repetitions,
the ‘Pieces of eight’, the rote ‘Pretty boys’,
dropped from tired beaks like peanut shells;
birds bored far beyond the thinning bone.
Compulsive as a handwasher who never
satisfies herself against germy armies
(save her hands are gloved in blood,
and cleansed into gauntlets of agony)
the caged bird will repeat this or that,
sigh, then hear that weird word clever,
thrown at his misery like a charity coin,
a beggar at our table of meaning.
But to see them treed, hanging upside-down,
greeting wet wind like a blown umbrella,
yellow winking at sun like a wicked punch-line,
raucous joy a cascade of brassy cunning sax;
this is the true sound of this bossy bright thing.
Why quibble about what they know, or don’t?
A screech floats to ground like a metal bird,
cut with tin-shears by a half-blind drunk,
so gratingly loud that ears are near-shorn.
Cockatoos mar the sky with jagged freedom,
as far from a nightingale’s sweet treacle
as a sudden mouthful of shattered glass.
P.S. Cottier
Muse with beak
Take this poem as a kind of apology for my rampant criticism of Canberra’s weather in my post on April 10th. Cockatoos are one of the many beautiful things about this city. There’s been some world-championship Canberra bashing going on lately, and I wanted to post something in response to the mindlessness of some of those criticisms. I’ve posted a link to this poem before, shortly after it appeared on the web-site of Canadian journal Contemporary Verse 2. Now it’s been in the print edition, and I feel free to publish it here. It came from a competition where participants must pre-register and have 48 hours to produce a poem containing all ten words given in a list. I didn’t enter the more recent competition (last weekend) as I knew I would be writing my line for the Tuesday Poem global poem, which has just been completed.
One ‘prompt’ at a time, please. I found the Tuesday Poem process, writing one line in an unfolding poem written by dozens of poets around the world line by line, very challenging. I was actually very scared as the time for writing my line approached. There were tears. There was a slight spat. But perseverance and wine got me through.
I am actually amazed that something readable, nay, even quite lovely, can come out of a process like this. For me, it was useful in that I had to make my line fit in with the previous parts of the poem. I was worried I could never produce something that gentle. But I did! I just played a straight bat and didn’t shy away from the rather joyous tone that threatened to stump me. To drop the inane cricket metaphor, it’s good to be pushed around a little at times, poetically speaking.
Click this feather, and you’ll be transported to the blog, where you can read the completed global poem, written to celebrate two years of Tuesday Poem.
PS Cottier 